Vultures Are Circling

Tracy [A former top-of-the-line escort in San Francisco] is relaxing on a Saturday morning with sailing friends. As she is bantering with a fellow competitor, her on-again off-again boyfriend, Lieutenant Gregory Phillips, comes into the yacht club. Tracy greets him and he asks if he can call in a favor. They step into her office (The upper deck outdoors). Because there might be a serial killer on the loose, he has been ordered to ask Tracy if she can get an undercover Vice cop into the Eden Connection as an S&M girl. The biggest rub is that the vice cop who is going undercover is Tracy’s most heated frenemy and rival for Greg’s attention, Vice Sergeant Terry Frankfurter, AKA Hot Dog. Tracy is between a rock and a hard place. Nora reluctantly agrees. Tracy picks up Frankfurter and as they drive to the condo, Hot Dog admits that if she has to go all the way with a customer, she will. In the condo, during Hot Dog’s makeover, Tracy notices that Frankfurter has lost some weight. There is an imperceptible sallowness about her. On Hot Dog’s first out-call, once she determines the client isn’t the slasher, she goes all the way. There is nothing her back-up can do about it. A week later, on a Sunday morning, Frankfurter was killed by the slasher, right under her back-up’s nose. Tracy is pissed. She confronts Phillips with the question, “Who’s stupid idea was this anyway? Seems to me the operation was bungled from the get-go.” A task force is formed. Tracy is asked to join the task force as an expert adviser. Tracy and Phillips work together, but Tracy isn’t going to allow any relationship to change. Another escort is murdered. Days later another girl is killed. As they work through all the kill details, Tracy sees something that is escaping the others. After some questions, she points out of the five girls, three are overlays, and two others are overlays, but the two groups are close, but not identical. Des this indicate two killers? Tracy drives to Los Banos, a farming community and talks to Frankfurter’s parents, then her doctor, who turns out to be an oncologist. Terry had terminal brain cancer. The task force splits up. Tracy opts to work with Wormy so she can learn from a different teacher. Their group is tasked with the copy cat. They question the father (a state representative) of one of the girls. He denies that his daughter was a working girl. After an interview with a guidance counselor at San Jose State College, Tracy gets an identity on the copy cat. A man wanted his ex girlfriend dead, and killed a call girl simply to make up a matching homicide. Tracy and Phillips figure out some key evidence left behind the latest body dump, and are able to mentally jump ahead of the slasher. Lying in wait for the slasher to show, they renew their relationship. After a car chase on Highway One, which ends in Greg’s car being up-side down in a sand dune, Tracy is assigned a seat in the front of a CHP car and instructed to stay there. In the foggy night, the slasher manages evade the manhunt and smash out the window of Tracy’s police car. He forces Tracy to the driver’s seat. He shoves a CHP helmet over her head and tells her to “drive”. They are able to leave the premises without being stopped in the fog. He makes her drive somewhat aimlessly in the west area of San Francisco, then orders her stop in Golden Gate park. She knows what is coming next. Tracy manages to survive the attack, and later, in the front seat of the CHP car, he’s beginning to get ready for another attack. She’s had it. She stomps on the gas, driving like a wild woman to the Golden Gate. She plans to “take his half of the car off at a zillion miles an hour.” She wakes up in the hospital, with broken bones and a crooked smile. When she leaves, it is with Greg at her side, Lee driving and a few new dark secrets in her brain’s recesses. And the media Vultures scramble about to make their deadlines.